‘Black Kids Deserve To Go To Narnia’: ‘The Three Tomes’s’ Breana Navickas On Building Fantasy On Her Own Terms

By the time Breana Navickas released the animatic pilot for The Three Tomes on YouTube in October, she had already been working on the project for nearly two years. She was also pregnant, between jobs, and watching the animation industry shed shows, creators, and entire communities at an alarming rate.

What emerged from that moment of uncertainty is a deeply personal YA fantasy about a Black teen magical girl, vampire romance, and the insistence that fantasy should be allowed to be joyful, messy, and unapologetically Black. It’s also really fun, despite being during a dark period in Navickas’s work life.

“It was just a very depressing time,” Navickas says. “I was unemployed, I was pregnant, and all of the layoffs and mergers were going crazy. And it also wasn’t lost on me that, as a Black person who was also queer, a lot of shows that were Black and brown or queer were just… leaving. They were being cut short. They were being pulled off streaming services.”

Navickas, a queer storyboard revisionist currently working at Disney Television Animation, has spent nearly a decade in the industry helping to build other people’s worlds. The Three Tomes represents something different: an external creative outlet, free from studio oversight and executive second-guessing.

“With the state of the industry being a hot mess as it is,” she explains, “I think it’s so important for us as creatives who are sort of like cogs in the machine to have external outlets away from the studio system. I want to be able to tell my stories the way I want to without any meddling from the top.”

The story centers on Tammy Harris, a Black teen in the 2010s Midwest who accidentally acquires witch powers while shooting a DIY horror film with her best friend, Sia. After opening an ancient tome that contains thirteen trapped spirits, Tammy must hunt them down, while being pursued by a monstrous entity and its vampire minions, and while trying very hard not to fall in love with said vampires. Navickas describes the project, with a knowing laugh, as “Cardcaptor Sakura x Twilight, the non-racist parts, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, with a dash of Fruits Basket and Sailor Moon.”

That genre mashup is intentional. Navickas grew up loving anime, magical girl shows, and supernatural romance, but rarely saw herself reflected in them. “I’m 32. I’m a millennial. The 2010s were peak Twilight, Vampire Diaries, Divergent,” she says. “I really liked those things, but I never saw myself in them. And when Black kids show up in fantasy, it’s questioned. It’s like, ‘Why is the mermaid Black? Why are there Black dwarves?’ And it’s like, because they can be. Shut up.”

She returns often to a line from a fan that crystallized the project’s purpose: “Someone on Bluesky said, ‘Black kids deserve to go to Narnia.’ And that really hit me. We really do.”

Navickas is also outspoken about the lack of teen- and YA-focused animation in the U.S. studio system. “It feels like we only really have preschool, six-to-eleven, and adult,” she says. “Teenagers want YA stories where they can see themselves going on adventures, doing dumb teen stuff. Anime does a really good job of letting different age groups have their own lanes. We just don’t do that here.”

Rather than wait for studio interest, Navickas released The Three Tomes as a full pilot animatic with a few brief fully animated sequences that show what a finished version could look like. “We all kind of had the same mindset,” she says of fellow indie creators. “Let’s just get it out there in animatic form, because that’s what we have time for. But also show a slice of full animation so people can see, ‘Hey, this is what it could be.’”

The response has been modest but meaningful. “For somebody who didn’t have much of a platform at all, my view counts are fairly decent,” Navickas says. “And I already have super fans. Someone wrote a thirteen-page essay about the pilot a few days after it came out. I was like, oh, they’re very passionate.”

Building that audience has meant leaning into fandom-driven spaces like Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube, and sharing character-focused extras, illustrations, mini-animatics, and small moments that wouldn’t fit cleanly into an episode. “People want to know what food the characters like, what sleeping position they have,” she laughs. “That stuff makes people care.”

The project’s origins trace back to a simple doodle Navickas posted years ago. “I was frustrated with the ‘Black best friend with glasses’ trope,” she says. “So I drew two girls and asked, ‘Which one do you think is the main character?’ And I just kept doodling.” Over time, the idea expanded: magic books, a nonbinary best friend, and eventually a pair of vampire love interests. “I love love triangles,” she admits.

Navickas credits formal writing classes with helping her turn instinct into structure. “As a board artist, you’re already a storyteller,” she says. “But I was scared of writing. I had to stop being afraid of words.” That confidence now carries into what comes next. She is currently writing episode two, with even bigger plans for the long term. “If I had a bajillion dollars, I have two to three seasons laid out,” she says. “Right now it’s just about how we get there.”

She’s quick to emphasize that The Three Tomes was a team effort, involving fellow professionals, emerging artists, voice actors, and Luv Letter, a Black woman–owned independent animation studio that handled the animation. But the vision at its core remains distinctly hers: Black, queer, femme-forward, and intentionally fun.

“Not all Black stories have to be about trauma,” Navickas says. “We can be whimsical. We can be magical. We can have vampire boyfriends. I’m making the thing I would have wanted to see when I was younger.”